New Trends in Foreign Market Entry Mode Choices: The Case of Italian Mid-Sized Companies

Abstract

As Italian SMEs increasingly expand their markets overseas, the internationalization processes evolve towards more complex market entry modes based on equity forms of international expansion and investment such as JVs and WOSs. Research on international high-control entry mode has tended to concentrate on large firms. In order to test the choice between equity and non-equity entry modes to the specific category of the mid-sized companies, the paper provides two main contributions: 1) it proposes an integration of three perspectives, transaction cost, institutional and resource-based theory; 2) it empirically verifies the applicability to the medium sized firms of the proposed framework.